


Rescue Mission

by Griddlebone



Category: Power Rangers Megaforce
Genre: Cats, Female Protagonist, Gen, Rescue Missions, Silly, Tree Climbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 13:48:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17326163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griddlebone/pseuds/Griddlebone
Summary: Despite her better judgment, Gia rescues a kitten from a tree.





	Rescue Mission

**Author's Note:**

  * For [terrierlee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/terrierlee/gifts).



Gia takes a deep breath, lets it go. There’s no going back now and, for the first time since she became a Power Ranger, there’s no backup. There’s nobody to swoop in and save her. If she screws up now, the consequences aren’t going to be good. Dire might even be the better word.

Gia takes another breath and doesn’t look down. She must be at least fifteen, probably closer to twenty, feet up this tree by now. And though she’s currently wedged into a fairly stable fork where a sizeable branch splits off from the main trunk, she knows she’s going to have to go out on a limb—literally—to achieve her objective.

If she slips and falls, she’s not just going to risk serious injury, she’s going to risk everyone at school finding out that _Gia Moran_ fell out of a tree while trying to rescue a crying kindergartener’s _cat_.

This little rescue mission isn’t like Gia at all. She’s painfully aware that it’ll completely ruin her image if word of this gets out, but something about the situation just screamed for her to intervene. Maybe it’s the fact that now she’s a Power Ranger, a superhero, and it’s her job to help save the world from alien invaders and, she guesses, temporary little heartbreaks. Because the cat’s going to come down out of the tree on its own eventually, or someone would call the fire department, or…

This time she lets her breath out in an exasperated sigh. _She_ should have called the fire department, probably. Yet here she is. Leaping before she looks. Of course.

And she had better get moving, because getting stuck in this tree instead of falling out of it will be equally bad for her reputation.

She braces her feet against another branch and pushes, inching herself forward and out onto the branch where the cat is hiding until she’s stretched full-length on it. Even like this she still can’t quite reach the cat. From this close she can see it’s a tiny little thing, hardly more than a kitten, and it’s mewling in a particularly heart-rending way, like it doesn’t know what to do next.

“Just… stay there,” Gia tells it, fully aware of how pointless it is to try to reason with a scared animal. That doesn’t stop her. It almost makes her feel better about the whole thing to talk herself through it. “I’m going to get you down.”

The cat looks at her and its eyes go wide. It starts to back away, toward the thinner, frailer branches at the outer edge of the tree.

“No, no, no,” Gia says, practically begging as she inches even further away from the main trunk. Her heart is pounding, her body filled with an exhilarating sense of impending danger. Now she’s really in the moment where things could go south, and fast. “Stay where you are, where this branch is thick enough to hold me!”

This doesn’t seem to sway the cat at all, but at least it stops backing away.

She risks unwrapping one arm from the branch to reach toward it. “Here, kitty.”

The cat doesn’t understand because of course it doesn’t. It’s a cat. And it’s still too far out for her to reach, and with the way the branch is swaying and creaking underneath her, she doesn’t trust it to hold her weight for much longer. She needs an idea and she needs it soon, or she’s going to have to shimmy her way back down this tree and face a disappointed five-year-old. And she’ll still have to call the fire department.

Internally despairing, she wiggles her fingers in what she hopes might be a tantalizing way, and finally the cat shows the faint resemblance of interest in her. She keeps it up and the situation slowly, agonizingly begins to turn around.

After a few minutes the cat seems to forget that it was scared because it was stranded high up in a tree with no way down. Now it’s focused on the ‘prey’ wiggling in front of it. As it creeps closer, Gia isn’t quite sure what she thought was going to happen or what she’s going to do if the cat pounces on her hand. Or bites her.

Worse, for all she knows, it’ll run away or fall if she tries to grab it. She really doesn’t want to be responsible for a five-year-old’s cat dying.

Striving to remain calm, she starts a slow retreat in the hopes of luring the cat back to safer territory. By some miracle it works, until she’s sitting on the branch where it forks from the tree’s trunk and is able to safely snatch the suddenly protesting cat up and into her arms.

Ignoring the animal’s protests, she stays where she is for a long time, just breathing. They aren’t out of the woods yet, but it reassures her to sense that the cat is just as scared as she is. Maybe even more.

“It’s all right,” she croons softly into one delicate ear. “You’re safe now.” She’s never wanted a pet cat before, but for some reason, irrationally, she wants one of her own right now. She dismisses the thought immediately, allowing sheer determined focus to snap into its usual place in her mind once again.

“I have her,” she calls down to the child waiting below, but ignores the enthusiastic response because she still has to find a way to get the two of them down safely. And she’s going to be doing it with just one arm, because she can’t trust the cat to understand to cling to her shirt all the way down.

One last deep breath, and then she takes the plunge. She swings her leg over the branch so she’s not straddling it anymore, but leaning over it. It takes all the strength she has to start lowering herself over the branch, reaching with one foot to find the next one down. And so on down and down, for what seems like forever.

It’s only then that she makes a mistake and puts her weight on a branch that’s too new and small to support it, one that probably should have been pruned off. The branch snaps and all thought shoots out of Gia’s mind, replaced by sheer terror—for the girl, for the cat, for herself and her reputation—as gravity takes its course.

They fall the last three or four feet, and Gia crash lands flat on her butt with a wince as the impact shoots up her spine but at least the cat is safe and sound. It all but leaps out of Gia’s grasp and into the waiting arms of its girl.

And the smile on that five-year-old girl’s face as she snuggles her rescued kitten almost makes the whole escapade worth it.


End file.
